The “Gothic Complex” in Shelley: From Zastrozzi to The Triumph of Life

The persistent use of Gothic motifs by Shelley from his early Gothic novels
(1810-11) all the way to The Triumph of Life (1822) has
only been partly explained up until now. This essay argues that Shelley develops,
across his career in ways especially visible in The
Triumph, a "Gothic complex" of connected features that look all the way back
to how the "Gothic Story" began in Horace Walpole's The Castle of
Otranto (1764). By developing these features as he does, Shelley is
able to reveal with great power the underlying conflicts at his (and our) time
between retrograde belief-systems that people still accept as dominant and true, on
the one hand, and, on the other, progressive re-castings of those old shapes that
can make them point to revolutionary ideologies that can change the world as his
characters and readers perceive it.

The “Gothic Complex” in Shelley: From Zastrozzi to The Triumph of Life

Jerrold E. HogleUniversity of Arizona

1. Ever since John Murphy in 1975 traced the persistence of “Gothic” figurations from
P.B. Shelley’s earliest works through Prometheus Unbound, we
have come to see, as Stephen Behrendt has said in his edition of Shelley’s Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811),
“unmistakable foreshadowings” in those adolescent “romances” of his major
achievements between 1818 and 1822 (Shelley 2002b, 12). A vital question remains,
however: what is really most fundamentally Gothic — and
what is most fundamentally symbolized because of that Gothicism — in what continues
from those early efforts all the way to the unfinished Triumph of
Life? Even the best explanations since Murphy of what lasts from this
poet’s youthful recastings of Ann Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, and Charlotte Dacre do not
ultimately answer this question, though I think they have taken us part of the way.
Behrendt himself rightly shows that, once Shelley gets past direct imitations of
Lewis or Dacre (as in his poem on “The Wandering Jew”), his early romances point, as
the Gothic always has, to a “world in which traditional beliefs and values have
eroded” but also one where the pull of those past ideologies remains (Shelley 2002b,
20). The result in Zastrozzi and St.
Irvyne, Behrendt concludes, is “an unwillingness to fully ‘resolve’ the
myriad contradictions” in the Gothic rendering of their major characters, who thus
become precursors of the powerful complexity in the Beatrice of Shelley’s Gothic play
The Cenci (1819; Shelley 2002b, 30-31). John Whatley
essentially agrees by pointing out how these early novels “critique . . . religious
symbolism through [the] progressive philosophy” expressed by the most villainous
characters as they echo Enlightenment thinkers important to Shelley, albeit within
the frame of a traditional Gothic moralizing (Whatley 1999, 202). The consequence is
a “struggle between opposing views” acted out through conflicts between different
kinds of signifiers, so much so that “Zastrozzi” and the “Matilda” he serves or
“Wolfstein” as he is tempted towards selling his soul by the Rosicrucian “Ginotti” in
St. Irvine “hover in a curious, irresolvable middle state
between [the older] motivated symbol and [the newer] atheist sign” (Whatley 1999, 205
and 217).

2. But is what Behrendt and Whatley reveal spawned by Shelley’s own struggles among
attitudes as they fill the by-now extreme conventionality of the Gothic figures he
adapts, or are such irresolutions (as these critics intimate, but only sketchily)
bound up with the symbolic possibilities endemic to Gothic conventions? Peter Finch
has neatly sidestepped this question by seeing the intercalated plots of St. Irvyne, the Wolfstein story in a German-Gothic mode
reminiscent of Lewis and the Eliose story in a sentimental mode that recalls
Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise, as simply manifesting a
“contesting pull of narratives” that Shelley will work to critique and then recombine
in his later writing (Finch 36). Yet this argument begs the question of how much
both sets of conventions are bound up together, not just in the works of Ann
Radcliffe, but in the deliberate launching of the post-medieval Gothic in Horace
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764-65. The most
provocative approach to Shelley’s Gothicism, though, has been offered by Tilottama
Rajan. For her Zastrozzi and St.
Irvyne put in “question the cultural stereotypes in which they remain
caught” because of their Gothic predecessors, so much so that they both “write” and
“withdraw a transgressive narrative” at the same time (Rajan 243). That is because
they emphasize the “floating” nature of long-overused signifiers, including their
Gothicized character-types, and use them, especially the Ginotti of the Wolfstein
plot also called “Nempere” in the Eloise plot, to suggest a “semantic excess” of
inconsistent references to incompatible texts, from the very old to the current, that
exposes “the overdetermination of social and psychic texts in which” Shelley’s early
Gothic form of “narrative has its genesis” (Rajan 243, 245, 246). Nevertheless, the
question remains: are these semi-transgressions almost entirely Shelley’s, given how
emptied-out the Gothic seemed by 1810-11, or are they really creative extensions of
what the post-Walpolean Gothic most basically does in the conflicting tendencies
endemic to its symbolic constitution?

3. I want to argue for the second of these alternatives. Shelley, I believe, especially
in the best work of his final year as it builds on the most Gothic features of his
early fictions, exploits the symbolic possibilities, including the contradictions,
most basic to the Gothic as a mixed and self-questioning mode. He does so to such an
extent that it is those very dynamics that often make his final writings what they
are, and it is the very nature of the Gothic as he first explored it that sets the
stage for those late “triumphs” as they deal with the conflicting systems of belief
that he kept attempting to bridge throughout his writing. Indeed, I think that
Shelley develops a “Gothic complex” of interacting symbolic processes, based on
elements he experiments with as early as Zastrozzi and the
poems preceding it, that is carried out quite thoroughly as late as The Triumph of Life and consequently fulfills the potentials for
suggestion most inherent in the Gothic features of his earliest work, ones that end
up driving Shelley as much as he employs and transmogrifies them.

4. Although Whatley has more recently seen such a dynamic (as I do too) in the movement
of the “Shape all Light” recounted by Shelley’s re-creation of Rousseau (Whatley
2003, 80-89), this Gothic complex is manifested most fully in The
Triumph of Life, as I read it (Shelley 2002a, 483-500), when its Narrator
describes the victims of “Life’s” captivation of them by emphasizing how much their
methods of self-definition sadly resemble the symbolic rendering of Life itself in
its all-conquering chariot. That parallel is most visible in the passages from The Triumph I now cite here from the Narrator’s dream-vision,
particularly when the “shadow” overarching each walker reappears in the “dusky hood”
of Life’s shapeless “Shape”:

In addition, the importance of this whole pattern is underscored by the
replaying of it later in the dream-within-the-main-dream recalled by the
shade of Rousseau as he remembers his own first envisioning of the same parade. There
he sees its profusion of “dim forms” as proceeding, on the one hand, from the
draining of substance from the body that each shadow recalls and, on the other, from
the “creative [or is it de-creative?] ray” of Life’s central “car” that really
carries no solid or coherent occupant:

“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the grove

“Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,

The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air

Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers

“A flock of vampire-bats before the glare

Of the tropic sun, bringing ere evening

Strange night on some Indian isle, -- thus
were

“Phantoms diffused around, and some did fling

Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves,

Behind them, some like eaglets on the wing

“Were lost in the white blaze . . . . . . . . . . (ll.
480-90)

“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the old anatomies

Sate hatching their base broods under the shade

“Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes

To reassume the delegated power

Arrayed in which these worms did
monarchize

“Who make the earth their charnel . . . . . . . . (ll.
500-05)

“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I became aware

“Of whence these forms proceeded which thus stained

The track in which we moved; after brief space

From every form the beauty slowly waned,

“From every firmest limb and fairest face

The strength and freshness fell like dust, and left

The action and the shape without the
grace

“Of life; the marble brow of youth was cleft

With care, and in the eyes where once hope shone

Desire like a lioness bereft

“Of its last cub, glared ere it died; each one

Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly

These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves
blown

“In Autumn evening from a poplar tree ---

Each, like himself and like each other were,

At first, but soon distorted seemed to be

“Obscure clouds molded by the casual air,

And of this stuff the car’s creative ray

Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there . . .”
(ll. 518-34)

I find that Shelley’s “Gothic complex” is never more active than at these
moments and that these manifestations collectively bring forth the cruxes of his
earlier Gothicism, their deepest symbolic roots in the Walpolean Gothic, and the
kinds of meanings that can best be located in this kind of fiction-making, which is
indeed both highly regressive and radically progressive at the same time.

5. To begin with, the “shadows” of themselves projected by, yet finally controlling,
Life’s prisoners are indeed allusions to the material simulacra given off by objects
and people in Book IV of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (ca. 55
BC), also a critique of imperial Rome (Turner 281-82). But they recall just as much
what Terry Castle has so perceptively seen in Radcliffe’s Gothic of the mid-1790s:
the tendency in her (as well as Shelley’s) Lockean sense of perception to
“spectralize” whatever impressions it receives, given that all perceptions are not
objects but traces on the tabula rasa of our sensorium. This
vision of “all things existing only as perceived,” an axiom used in both Shelley’s
essay “On Life” (1819) and his Defence of Poetry (1821;
Shelley 2002a, 506 and 533), results in a Radcliffean world-view, as Castle puts it,
based on an “absorbing faith in the fantastic” whereby every ghost-like trace — each
overlaid by a mental interpretation of it formed out of “ideas” developed from
memories of other such traces — turns every other person or object or landscape into
a phantom, including externalizations interpreted (as so many are) to be mirrors of
the self (Castle 246). Such an empirical-but-also-Gothic understanding, Shelley
comes to see under Radcliffe’s influence among others, produces “a kind of thinking
dominated by nostalgic mental images” whereby “phatasmic objects” seem “even more
real at times than the material world” (Castle 247). As a result, the perceivers of
such phantasms as self-images, for example the slaves of Life in Shelley’s Triumph, submit their thinking to spectral figures of themselves
based on a past that is taken to be more real and permanent than it really is or was.
Their self-images thus become in their eyes fixed definitions of their “selves” to
which they believe they must submit, even though those “dim forms” are actually
ghosts of what is dead (made explicit by the skeletal “old anatomies” in The Triumph). Indeed, that extension of spectralization, as
Rousseau’s dream presents it, means that such self-images can operate like
“vampire-bats,” less a figure from Radcliffe and more of a nod to the gradual
Gothicizing of the vampire-figure in the eighteen-teens by Byron and Coleridge, then
Mary Shelley, then John Polodori’s The Vamypre (1819; see
Hogle 2004). Shelley’s 1822 bloodsuckers, each being a version of thought’s empire
over itself, psychologically drain the life out of every perceiver who believes
himself subject to them as permanent points of reference and so keeps obeying his
former sense of his own nature. In that way, they enact the Death-in-Life that
captivates those who have accepted the control of a master construct (“Life”) also
“de-form[ed]” vampirically by its own “dusky hood,” the “shadow of a tomb” or “old
anatomy” to which It, itself an antiquated perception of existence, keeps submitting
over and over.

6. After all, this Gothic retrospection also harkens back to Walpole’s Otranto, beyond its own echoes of Locke, to the way the three different
ghosts there are far more shades of shades than they are specters of bodies. As I
have noted on other occasions (as in Hogle 2012), one Otranto
specter is an enlarged fragment of an effigy over a grave (almost
literally the “shadow of a tomb”), another is an image that walks out
of a full-length portrait, and the third, the ghost of the Hermit of Joppa who
intones warnings from the mouth of his fleshless skull (anticipating Shelley’s “old
anatomies”), is a blatant re-presentation of a dance macabre
skeleton from medieval painting. All of these are thoroughly floating signifiers,
“shadows of shadows” in Rousseau’s words from Shelley’s Triumph, not surprising, it turns out, for a Protestant author (Horace
Walpole) whose equally famous letters celebrate his own antiquarianism as a playing
with old icons that “cannot disappoint” because there is no longer any “reason to
quarrel with their emptiness” (Walpole 1937-83, 10: 192). In the Preface to his first
edition of Otranto, we should remember, where he pretends to
be the translator of a post-Reformation manuscript that once kept alive a Catholicism
that for him should be fading, Walpole sets up all the Catholic specters
and machinery in his tale to be viewed as symbols “exploded now even from romances”
and thus emptied of their old grounds of belief even as they continue to play those
out for audiences of a later time (Walpole 1996, 6). Consequently, readers of what
Walpole himself labeled the first new kind of “Gothic Story” in his Second Edition of
Otranto (1996, 3) face tormented characters, often
debating within themselves, whose beliefs make them subject to “phantoms” that are
actually “dim forms,” yet forms which they take to be indicators of unchangeable
reference-points in the past haunting them by drawing them back towards those
supposed grounds, however outdated. Walpole’s own critique of the medieval Gothic
materials in his neo-Gothic, we find, right along with his and Radliffe’s Lockean
sense of perception, is clearly among the fundamental pretexts for Shelley’s critique
of the way so many of us enslave ourselves to a fixed sense of life by accepting old
symbolic orders, especially in the ways we mirror ourselves to ourselves in what are
really the “base broods” (or symbolic constructs) of “old anatomies.”

7. At the same time, though, the Gothic, even for Walpole, is not that simple, so
neither is Shelley’s “Gothic complex” in The Triumph and
elsewhere. As much as Walpolean Gothic figures can be exposed as “floating
signifiers” separable from their older grounds and thus able to signify newer ones,
there is an insistent antiquity in them, much as there is in Shelley’s reenactment of
Dantean and Petrarchan dream-visions and terza-rima verse-forms along with echoes of
the eighteenth-century Gothic in his new Trionf. Such a
paradox at the very core of the Gothic indicates (in David Punter’s words), yes, a
“fear of the violence of the past and its power over the present,” hence The Triumph’s vision of Life as echoing ancient Rome’s paradings
of its captives, but also a “longing for many of the qualities” and secure grounds of
belief “which that past possessed” or at least seemed to in retrospect (Punter 418).
As Karl Marx has shown, the rise of new ideologies and modes of production struggles
against the still-powerful draw of older beliefs and systems of exchange, and the
Gothic is the most flagrant symbolic manifestation of that cultural contestation in
the history of English fiction-making. The pull of “ancient romance” elements,
“exploded” as they are, is just as strong in the neo-Gothic as the pull of the more
“modern” ones akin to the rising middle-class novel, according to Walpole’s
definition of “Gothic Story” in his Preface to Otranto’s
Second Edition (Walpole 1996, 9-11). That looking-backwards-and-forwards
simultaneously, like the “Janus-faced Shadow” that actually drives Life’s chariot for
Shelley, coincides with Walpole’s preference, which he expressed in the 1750s, for
keeping at least a “shadow of monarchy” on an otherwise “empty chair of state,” like
the “ghost of Banquo” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Walpole
1847, 377), rather than facing the uncertainties of total revolution that eventually
made England (and even Shelley) fearful of the violence in France. It is for these
reasons that E.J. Clery has so correctly viewed the first “Gothic Story” as setting a
pattern by both articulating and disguising a profound “contradiction” in the culture
of Walpole’s time, in his case “between the traditional claims of [aristocratic]
landed property and the new claims for the [bourgeois] private family” (Clery 77).
With its Janus-faced symbols, style, and focus on characters so internally
conflicted, the Gothic has consequently become in the post-Renaissance West the
fictive place where the deepest and thus most feared irresolutions in the
culture between ideologies and world-views are sequestered and distanced, as the fear
of death and dissolution are in Edmund Burke’s terror-based “Sublime” also basic to
the Gothic tradition, yet where those unresolved quandaries are hyperbolically
reenacted and played out in the guise of concurrently retrograde and experimental
fiction able to be conservative and progressive all at once.

8. Shelley’s continuation of the Gothic in his Triumph,
therefore, is willingly pulled towards the kind of enslavements to patterns of sin
allegorized by Petrarch and Dante, yet it remains determined to show that their very
Catholic patterns of God-centered allegory are based on the projections of mere
thoughts into externalized “shadows” that have come to be interpreted as absolute
truths and thus as tyrannizing sources of “fear” enforcing submission – all of which
is a use of allegorical figures to attack the premises of old allegory itself,
without leaving them behind altogether, alongside resurrections of Walpolean and
Burkean “old anatomies” to show how such emptied-out figures can still have the
psychological force they do. Ultimately Shelley realizes in his rendering of The Triumph of Life that he, his poem, and his audience cannot
entirely escape from the systems of belief he wants to explode in it, one reason for
the persistence of the construction of Life that drives this poem’s throngs while
Life itself turns out to be no more than a “Shape” continuously being un-shaped and
re-shaped again. Even the shade of Rousseau, in serving as a Virgilian truth-teller
to Shelley’s Dantean Narrator, is unable to overcome a lingering contradiction of
ideologies in his own beliefs only somewhat revised from those of the author of whom
he is a sympathetic critique. As much as he blames himself for striving to arrest and
confine the movement of the “Shape all light” in his
dream-within-the-Narrator’s-dream, even as it keeps transfiguring itself from state
to state, “forever sought, forever lost” (l. 431), that Shape is itself a
retrospective Beatricean as well as a revolutionary “Asia” or “Witch of Atlas” figure
from Shelley’s earlier poetry. Rousseau in Shelley’s Triumph
thus remains undecided as to how much his own submission to “Life” is his willful
fault in the face of her transference across traces of perception or how
much that failing results from the necessary influence of the environment in which he
was placed while he lived: “if the spark with which heaven lit my spirit / Earth had
with purer nutriment supplied,” he wonders in a passage not cited above
that echoes the Wordsworth “Immortality” Ode about which Shelley was always
conflicted, would “Corruption . . . not now thus much inherit / Of what was once
Rousseau” and now both is and is not him simultaneously (ll. 201-04)? The struggle
Shelley famously had with William Godwin’s view of Necessity within his early “Gothic
sensibility” (as Donald Reiman called it in 1981) – how much is behavior determined
by choice or by environment? — is manifestly unresolved in his final unfinished
poem, and we now see it is the persistence of the Gothic in that very Triumph that most conceals and reveals that irresolution, and
many other quandaries of Shelley’s era, even as he was about to set sail into the
Gulf of Spezia.

9. In any case, speaking of echoes, this whole Gothic process conjoined with others is,
in its “complex” of disparate yet interconnected elements, remarkably, if not
completely, similar to what we often see in Zastrozzi and
St. Irvyne, published 11-12 years earlier. Consider this
passage taken from Zastrozzi, a moment so typical of the
overwrought characterizations in this tale’s constant echoing of The
Monk and Zofloya that it could have come from
almost any chapter, though is here excerpted from near the end:

For a time Matilda stood immovable. At last she looked on
Verezzi; she gazed downwards [since he had cast himself at her feet] upon his
majestic and youthful figure; she looked upon his soul-illumined countenance,
and tenfold love assailed her softened soul. She raised him – in an oblivious
delirium of sudden fondness she clasped him to her bosom and, in wild and
hurried expressions, asserted her right to his love.

Her breast palpitated with fierce emotions; she pressed her
burning lips to his; most fervent, most voluptuous sensations of ecstacy
reveled through her bosom.

Verezzi caught the infection; in an instant of oblivion, every
fidelity which he had sworn to another, like a baseless cloud, dissolved away;
a Lethean torpor crept over his senses; he forgot Julia, or remembered her only
as an uncertain vision, which floated before his fancy more as an ideal being
of another world, which he might thereafter adore there, than as an enchanting
and congenial female, to whom his oaths of eternal fidelity had been given.
(Shelley 2002b, 139)

While it does repeat the spectralized images
of other beings projected and then obsessed upon by the characters of both Lewis and
Dacre, with Radcliffe hovering in the background, this moment has the confused
Verezzi, not knowing he is Zastrozzi’s hated half-brother, envision his long-time
projection of the remembered “Julia” as separating from her now “uncertain” form in
the past and receding behind the Matilda who has relentlessly pursued him, yet
explicitly without Julia disappearing as his ultimate ideal.
This complex recalls the ending of Walpole’s Otranto where Theodore, finally revealed as the Castle’s true heir,
accepts marriage to the Isabella once pursued by the usurping Manfred but keeps
thinking of the dead “Matilda” (here the daughter of Manfred) whom he loved devotedly
before she died, as Verezzi thinks Julia has at this point in Zastrozzi. Shelley’s early Gothic thereby replays the figural pattern of
Otranto’s final sentence, in which Theodore decides “he
could know no happiness but in the society of one [Isabella] with whom he could
forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” because of
Matilda’s irreversible absence and yet her constant looming in a remembered past that
remains an absolute point of reference (Walpole 1996, 115), like the primal crimes
revealed as the causes of all the specters of specters in the first neo-“Gothic
Story.”

10. The quintessentially Janus-faced nature of Walpole’s prototypical Gothic figure has
undeniably been transferred from The Castle of Otranto to
Zastrozzi, even to its ending where the
title character who rejects all religious traditions also confesses the root of his
vengeance to be the dying words of his mother (Shelley 2002b, 155). To much the same
extent, we can now see, too, the floating signifier of Julia’s image for Verezzi,
reinforced by Matilda’s obsession with his surface “countenance” since the start of
Shelley’s novel, Gothically anticipates the “shadows of shadows” in the same author’s
late Triumph as they drift from their past referents while
being held fixedly by their projector-observers to those very receding grounds, dead
though they already are or, like Verezzi and Julia, are about to be. Shelley could
not have conceived of what is really the “moment of truth” in The
Triumph, the choice between accepting the drift of signifiers towards
future redefinitions and the re-anchoring of them to dead “anatomies” from the past,
unless there had been the tug-of-war in the Walpolean Gothic figure that he had
thoroughly played with in his more youthful writings. He also would not have had as
apt a symbolic mode for half-concealing and half- revealing The
Triumph of Life’s hesitations between free-willed choice and the pressure
of one’s historical conditions if he had not worked with and continued to employ a
Gothic mode designed by its nature to be a repository for unresolved
conflicts among contending beliefs. In the Zastrozzi passage
above, we have to admit, the text hesitates, just as The Triumph
will, between condemning the characters for their essentially selfish choices
and suggesting that such choices are already made for them. After all, the same
characters keep making the same errors again and again within the pervasive
atmosphere of their Gothic environment. These are stances toward which they are
driven, like the victims of Shelley’s “Life,” by what Godwin invokes in the original
main title of his quite Gothic Caleb Williams (1794): the
necessary consequences of “Things As They Are.”

11. Now we can see the fully Gothic basis of what previous interpreters have begun to
find in Shelley’s early romances, as well as the essentials of the “Gothic complex”
that are transferred almost intact from Walpole through the Gothic of the 1790s to
the early Shelley and to The Triumph of Life. Myriad
contradictions of character cannot be resolved in Zastrozzi
and St. Irvyne, as Behrendt has said, because their very
construction is rooted in the Gothic’s at least two-directional tug of
war between older and newer conceptions of human psychology as well as waning and
developing economies. The equally “irresolvable middle state between the motivated
symbol and the atheist sign” found by Whatley in Shelley’s Gothic novels stems from
their Walpolean mix of retrogression and rebellion that makes characters and images
both potentially floating signifiers and entities attractively anchored in past
realities, causes, and beliefs even when those are truly dead and gone. Finch’s sense
of the conflict between the tragically fated Gothic and the assumptions of
sentimentalism in the plots of St. Irvyne, meanwhile,
actually stems from that novel’s acceptance of a Gothic mode that has, since its
beginnings and not just in Radcliffe, internally combined freely-chosen
states of feeling with fated hauntings from older assumptions, as in the ending of
Otranto where Theodore willfully accepts a woman because
she can help him indulge his “melancholy” over his lost true love but also because he
cannot help himself as the destined resolver of an age-old usurpation guided, perhaps
from heaven, towards a marriage that reunites the two families with the most
sanctioned claims to the castle of Otranto. The quite similar depiction of unresolved
tensions between external and internal causalities in Zastrozzi,St. Irvine, and The Triumph of Life
is made possible, after all, by the Walpolean Gothic providing unique verbal means
specifically for configuring ideological conflicts and their nagging irresolution.
Finally, too, what we have learned from Professor Rajan’s 1990s take on Shelley’s use
of Gothic (apart from what she has added in this very collection) depends entirely on
the Gothic itself being inherently a mode dominated by the uprooted, though also
backward-looking, signifier that can refer in its incessant mobility to many
different texts and ideologies of its own and former times – and thereby to the
conflicting ideologies in its many pre-texts that always (in Rajan’s words)
“overdetermine” it and make its symbols refer to a “semantic excess” of
“indeterminate” cultural debates. This dynamic is part of the disunified “essence” of
the Gothic in which, as Rajan has said, “reality has been replaced by hyperreality,
and mimesis by the simulacrum” (Rajan 243). I contend that Shelley’s critiques of
his own culture from Zastrozzi to The
Triumph of Life employ the Gothic as powerfully as they do precisely by
bringing forward these deep tensions at the core of it. This is the “Gothic complex”
he develops across his career so as to help his audiences realize the crossroads of
choices they face, unless they chose to ignore them, between the most retrospective
and destructive and the most progressive and liberating options for the ways we can
construct Life for ourselves then, now, and in the future.

Works Cited

Castle, Terry. “The Spectralization of the Other in The
Mysteries of Udolpho.” The New Eighteenth Century:
Theory, Politics, English Literature. Ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura
Brown. London: Methuen, 1987. 231-53. Print.